Saturday, September 12, 2009

The Real Lessons of 9/11

"On this eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, it’s worth reflecting on how even a mildly competent U.S. President might have prevented the terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people and drove the United States into a spasm of revenge that has wasted untold blood and treasure.

The evidence of George W. Bush’s incompetence has emerged from official investigations, court cases and memoirs from key insiders but often has attracted less attention than the speculative arguments from conspiracy theorists about the 9/11 attacks being “an inside job.”

Ironically, it was the evidence of Bush’s stunning incompetence that gave momentum to the so-called “9/11 truth movement,” which argued that the U.S. government couldn’t be that inept and that therefore the Bush administration must have been complicit in the attacks."Consortium News

The big story, what has to be hammered into the minds of Yankee 'patriots', is how Bush and Co. squandered all the international good will after the attacks. People all over the world, myself included, were displaying U.S. flags in sympathy, and then the assholes in Washington went ahead and not only occupied Afghanistan (which at least was harbouring al-Qaeda leadership) but also Iraq (which of course had nothing to do with the attacks).

I like Naomi Klein's take in the Shock Doctrine that massive privatizations in the airline industry (started by Reagan) resulted in a shoddy security network which was utilized by the terrorists to commit their atrocities. Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld then used the attacks as a springboard to institute a few more invasions in the name of "democracy" and "freedom" which resulted in two more countries having their markets ripped open by cruise missiles.

Dawg, while I seriously doubt that the Bush regime was directly complicit in the attack, it's clear that they did not react to what was easily sufficient intelligence to have been far better prepared to stop it. Most likely, they wanted the attack to happen so they could use it to justify their plans for conquest and domestic control. 9/11 was the "pearl harbor" scenario discussed at AEI and PNAC.